Here Without You
by angel-death-dealer
Summary: Kate dies, and her daughter is sent to live with Sawyer, her biological father, even though she's been raised by Jack. Leah and Sawyer don't get on, until they discovered that Sawyer didn't leave her in the way they thought.
1. Chapter 1

There comes a time in your life when you think that nothing could make up for what you've lost. You think that nothing could possibly get any worse, because the biggest part of your life has been taken from you. Leah sat at the kitchen table, her younger brother and sister, Ben and Rachel, on either side of her, listening to the police talking to them. She shook her head slowly as tears made their way down her cheeks. It couldn't true...it just couldn't.

"Are you sure?" She asked finally, her voice thick from disbelief and tears.

The policeman before her shook his head sympathetically. "I'm sorry, but she died in the hospital. She wasn't alone, your father was there."

Leah knew they were talking about, but he wasn't her father. He was her stepfather. Her real father, James Ford, known frequently as Sawyer, had walked out when she was four years old, leaving her confused and her mother heartbroken, and Jack Shepherd, the man who once had been like an uncle to her, was now the father of Ben and Rachel. She didn't mind, because Jack was every bit of the father that she wanted, but it was strange how she could hear the others calling him Dad, and find it so hard to do it herself sometimes.

She knew from an old photograph that she didn't look much like her father. All she had was his hair colour. Hers was long and curling like her mothers, but it was blonde like his. She had her mother's green eyes and freckles as well. In fact, she was told that she was a replica of Kate except for the hair colour. At fifteen years old, she was already just as tall as her mother, and they shared the same hobbies...shopping, watching movies...in fact, she would spend more time with her mother than she did with her friends.

Ben was eight years old. He was born a few years after Jack and Kate got married. He looked a lot like Jack, just with freckles, so did Rachel. She was four now, just the age when Leah lost her father.

And now they were all losing their mother.

It was close to midnight. Jack was still at work, and Kate had gone out for the evening with a friend, so their grandfather, Sam, Kate's father, was minding them for the night. When the door knocked half an hour ago, Sam had answered it, thinking it to be Kate and she had forgotten her key, but it wasn't. It was the police. Leah had gone to bed not long before, havign stayed up late watching a movie, so she had lay in bed awake, listening to the muffled voices and gasps. Then, she heard the footsteps outside her room, and Sam came into the room to call her downstairs, then they woke Ben and Rachel up as well.

The police explained that Kate had collapsed in the street earlier that evening. When she was taken to the hospital, Jack had met them in the lobby, as her friend had called ahead. Apparently she had tried to ring them at home as well, but couldn't get through. They'd been having some problems with the phone line at the moment, so no calls were coming through properly.

At the hospital, they discovered that Kate's cancer had deteriorated quicker than the doctors had predicted. They said a few months ago that she had roughly a year left, and that was hard enough to cope with. So they had planned ahead for a year...things they were going to do together, and Kate had started writing letters to each of them for when she passed. They didn't realise how soon that was going to be.

Leah blinked hard, trying to contain the tears, but unable to do so. Rachel started bawling, and Leah pulled her into her lap, hugging her hard. Ben, as much as he hated to show affection to his sisters in physical way, hugged them as well, and Leah detatched one arm from Rachel to wrap it around Ben.

After a few minutes, her mobile rang on the table, and she hadn't realised that it was still on. Sam, who was closest to it, picked it up and looked at the caller ID before handing it to her.

"It's Jack." He told her.

She nodded, and answered the phone. Her voice was shaky and unsteady. "Hello?"

"Leah. I couldn't get through on the home phone." Jack explained. His voice was different. It was empty...broken. "Are you okay?" He asked her.

She swallowed a lump in her throat. "Is it true?" She asked desperately. "Tell me it's not true." She begged.

There was a long silence, and then: "It's true, Leah..." He whispered into the phone.

"No..." She said, crying again. "No, it can't be. It's too soon!" She protested.

"Hey, it's okay." Jack tried to comfort her. "Everything's going to be okay."

"No it's not!" She cried. "How can it be? She's gone! How can things be okay when she's not here?"

"Leah, listen to me." Jack instructed. "It's going to be okay, sweetheart, I promise you. I'm going to be home as soon as I can. They need me to fill in some paper work, and then I'll be home."

"Can't you come home now?" She asked him.

"I won't be long." He assured her.

"We need you here." She told him. "Paper can wait."

"Leah-"

"Please...Rachel's crying...Ben's hugging me. That's how I know things are bad. Ben is actually hugging me. The last time he did that he was small enough for me to pick him up." She reminded him. "Please...just come home, Jack..." She swallowed again. "...Dad..."

She found it hard to call Jack 'Dad', not because she didn't want to, but because she knew that somewhere out there was a man who she should be calling Dad, who had abandoned her. Calling Jack 'Dad' was something that only occured when she was really vulnerable, and it was what brought him to his knees everytime. He loved Leah as if she were his own daughter.

"I'll be there in ten minutes." He told her, and she was glad that he was coming straight home. "Will you be okay until then?" He asked her.

"What do I do, Jack?" She asked. "They're both crying, what do I do?"

There was a small silence, and then Jack's voice returned. "Ben wanted to watch the wrestling match, but I told him 'no' because it was a school night. Go and put it on for him." He instructed. "Just sit tight for a minute, I'll be there as soon as I can."

"'Kay." She answered weakly.

"Pass the phone to your grandfather for a minute..." Jack said. "Just hold on, sweetheart."

"Bye..." She said, and passed the phone to Sam, who took the handset into the kitchen to talk to him.

"What did Dad say?" Ben asked her tearily.

She sniffed, blocking the new tears that threatened to come. She needed to be strong until Jack got home, even if that was only a little while away. "He said you can watch the wrestling." She told him, and lead him out of the kitchen and into the living room.

* * *

I hope you like this fic! It's going to have flashbacks of Kate in, so she's not completely out of the picture, and she lives on in our Leah! Please review and let me know what you think!


	2. Chapter 2

It was the middle of the night. Rachel was back in her bed, fast asleep, oblivious to the fact that her mother wasn't ever coming back to her. Ben was sitting before the television, watching the wrestling, but not cheering on his favourite fighters like he usually did. Leah, however, had slipped into the back garden to be on her own. She ran, because she didn't know what else to do.

Sam was watching over the other two, and Jack was on his way back from the hospital, but she didn't need either of them. She didn't need to be told that she was in a better place, and that things were going to be okay, because in her head, she didn't see how they could be. Kate was gone, when she should have been here. That wasn't right at all.

She went to the tree at the bottom of the garden, and climbed as high as she could. She was always climbing that tree. She remembered just after Ben had been born, when Jack had moved them into this house, that she had fallen in love with the tree and started climbing it before the sale was even final. The large garden had been the selling point for them. It was huge, bigger than the garden that she saw in the photographs from her last house. That photograph in the garden had him in though - her real father. Somehow, it made sense that this one was better.

She sat up in the tree, finding the spot on a branch where she could sit comfortably. She sometimes came up here on summer nights like last night, where she could watch the sun set below the horizon. The first time she had done it, Kate had been sat next to her. Kate used to love that tree just as much as Leah did, climbing it all the time, running around the garden, laughing, screaming, happy. The climbing had stopped when she had gotten sick though, she was just too ill to do it. She would watch Leah with longing eyes to see her in the branches, savouring every memory of her daughter as it had merged with memories of her own past.

She sat there for a long time, she didn't know how long for, and she didn't realise how cold she was either. All she could think about, was that her mother was gone. Dead. She wasn't ever going to see her again.

"Leah?"

She heard the voice calling her, and looked down from her branch to see Jack standing at the base of the tree looking up at her.

He was still wearing the shirt and pants that he had worn to work that evening. He looked tired, dark marks under his eyes emphasised with the red that was creepign around them. He had been there, when the ambulance had brought her in, and he had been there when she had gone. It had ripped him apart to watch her take her final breath in his arms, before he lost her forever.

When he had first reached the house, Sam had greeted him, giving his son-in-law a hug before Jack's attention was brought to his children. Ben came over and hugged him, and Jack had sat with him whilst he cried, and he tried his best to comfort his son, the son that Kate had bore him, until his cries had sent him to sleep. Then he had carried Ben up to his bed, replacing him under the blankets where he was peaceful.

Sam had told him that Leah had put Rachel back in bed, so he checked on her before going back downstairs. He stroked back her dark hair, giving her a gentle kiss on her forehead before leaving to see Leah.

He stood at the base of the tree, looking up at her. He knew that she would have been there. She spent more time in that tree then she did in the house. For once, however, he wasn't seeing her as the bubbly girl who would come bounding downstairs happily every morning. Leah was just a shadow of her former self.

Lori, the family dog, was curled up at the base of the tree. Whilst they had brought the dog for them all, Lori was never far from Leah. They had her since Leah was ten years old. The dog was still young, but even she knew that something was wrong. Jack guessed that it was because whenever Lori wasn't with Leah, she was with Kate. She was culed up at the bottom of the tree, her head rested on her paws as if she were feeling sorry for herself. Jack was used to the border collie coming running up to him when he entered the house, but the dog just stared at him, making a small whimpering sound.

He went over, stroking the dog on the top of the head before looking back up at the tree branches to where Leah was. He watched her for a moment. She knew he was there, but she gave him a glance and nothing more before returning to watch the sky.

Jack was at a complete loss with himself. He had just found out that the woman he loved was dead, and she had died in his arms, and now he was supposed to reassure her daughter that things were going to be okay. How was he meant to do that? Things weren't okay - Kate was gone.

"Le-" He began, but she cut him off before he could even finish saying her name.

"It's true, isnt it." She called down, it wasn't a question.

He nodded, ignoring the fact that she wasn't looking at him. "Yeah." He said, his voice raw from the crying that he had done at the hospital. "Yeah, it's true."

He watched Leah bow her head, and then wipe at her eyes. "I knew that it would be true if you knew it as well." She said back.

He looked down at the ground, almost struggling with the weight of Kate's death and the children's sadness on his shoulders. He looked back up at her again. "Leah, come down, sweetheart." He asked of her.

"I'm fine up here." She said, shaking her head, even though she was frozen to the bone.

Jack sighed. The last thing he needed right now was for Leah to be the splitting image of Kate. She was like her in every way, including her stubbornness. "Please, Leah." He begged of her. "Just come and have some breakfast."

"I'm not hungry." She told him.

"Your grandpa said that you didn't eat your dinner yesterday." He said.

"I didn't feel well then." She said. "I'm still not hungry."

He sighed again, running his hand over his head. "Leah, you can't stay up there forever." He told her.

"I can try." She called down stubbornly.

Her mother had rubbed off on her more than he thought. He was sure he had this conversation with Kate on the island once. He would have delved into his memory more, but he couldn't bear to think about her at the moment. Every time he saw something that reminded him of her, he broke down, but the problem lay in the fact that everything reminded him of her.

"You're not alone, Leah." He called up to her. "Don't pretend to be."

His different approach seemed to work, and Leah looked down at him, realising that he was right. After all, he always was right. She looked back at the sky for a moment longer, and then started to climb down the branches. She was still in the sweat pants and small t-shirt that she had worn to bed, and now the chill was whipping at her bare arms. She noticed that her hands were stiff and numb from the cold.

When her feet touched the ground, Lori jumped around her excitedly, and she stroked his head until he calmed down. She stared at the border collie for a moment, and then Lori forced her nose against her palm, liking the inside of her hand. Then she nudged Leah's side, turning her towards her father. The dog was always more intelligent then they originally thought.

She turned to face Jack. She hadn't cried since she had been up in Rachel's room, when she was finally accepting what had happened, and now that she knew it was definately true, the tears were choking her again.

Jack opened his arms to her, and Leah ran into them, letting her tears come again without trying to hold them in this time. He held her tightly as she cried, with one hand on her back, and using the other to hold her head to his shoulder whilst he whispered words of comfort to her. She couldn't understand what he was saying to her over the sound of her crying, but knowing that he was doing something was comforting her a little.

She squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to believe what was happening. "I don't want her to be gone." She complained. "I want her to come back."

"So do I." Jack agreed, pulling away so that he could look at her face. She saw the tears in his cheeks too. "I'd like nothing more than to go inside and see your mother sitting on the couch, but we can't." He said, shaking his head. "We can't change what happened."

She let out a cough amongst her sobs. "Grandpa says we'll be okay." She told Jack.

He nodded. "You will be."

But she shook her head. "No, we won't be." She protested. "How can we be okay, if Mom's not here?" She let out another sob.

"Hey, hey, hey," Jack said soothingly, running his hand down Leah's long blonde hair. "Listen to me, everything is going to be okay." He assured her. "I'm still here, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going to let anything bad happen to you." He promised her.

She nodded, and hugged him again. For what felt like hours they just stood there, holding on to each other. She didn't feel the cold anymore, she could only feel the arms around her, and the pain that nagged inside of her. It hurt so much, and worse still, it was the kind of pain that only her mother could take away.

"Dad?" She asked, feeling his arms tighten around her slightly when she called him 'dad' in her tiny, weak voice. "I don't want to go to school today." She said.

He had to give a sad smile to the top of her head. Leah loved school so much. She had a good group of friends and was doing well in all her subjects, but he should have known that there wasn't going to be school on the agenda for them at the moment.

"I'll call them." He told her. "Come on, let's go inside." He instructed her again. "It's freezing, we don't want you to get sick."

Mom was sick, she held back from saying.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3:

Jack took Leah back inside, and somehow, managed to get through her stubbornness to get her to eat something. If she hadn't eaten the night before, she would need to have something. At first, she had resisted, saying that she was 'fine' and that she 'wasn't hungry', but the rumbling sound of her empty stomach was enough to contradict her. The fifth time she was about to resist, Ben came downstairs, acting like nothing had happened, asking for some breakfast. It was seven o'clock, the time that Kate normally woke him and Leah for school.

He had sat down at the table, and started to talk to Kate, until something in his mind triggered, and he fell silent, looking at Jack, who just shook his head.

"She's really not coming back, is she?" He asked his father.

Jack shook his head again. "No, Ben, she's not."

"Oh." Ben replied. He didn't know what else to say, and went back to his breakfast.

He was sitting beside Leah, and whilst she was staring into space, Jack placed a bowl of cereal before her, and unsure what else to do with herself, she ate it all.

Once the children were eating, talking in small, empty sentences to eat other, Jack started making phonecalls upstairs in his and Kate's bedroom. The bedroom they had shared for years. He organised the funeral for three days time. Then, he did the painful ordeal of digging out Kate's address book from her handbag, the one thing he had brought home from the hospital other than her wedding ring, and had started to call their friends and family to let them know.

He hadn't even considered calling a certain person until he came across their number. There was a chance that it wasn't even the right number, because as far as he was aware, it was the same number that was used from when Leah was still a toddler. Something inside of him, but only a small, spiteful part, wanting to forget the number, and not call them, but he knew that they deserved to know of Kate's death.

So he picked up the reciever one more time, adament that this would be the final telephone call he would make having to repeat the words 'Kate's dead' to someone who would all say the same thing. "I'm sorry" "How awful for you and the children." It was driving him insane to hear those things. It didn't matter how sorry they were, it wouldn't bring her back.

He dialled the number with shaking hands, and listening with broken breathing as the phone rang and rang, until a voice eventually picked up the other end. For once, something inside of him was glad to hear that Southern drawl at the other end of the phone.

"Hello?" He asked.

"Sawyer?" Jack asked quietly.

"Yeah, who's this?" Sawyer replied defensively.

"It's Jack." He sighed.

"Jack?" He checked over. "Doc Jack?"

"Yeah, it's me." He confirmed.

"Well, howdy Doc, long time no talk. What can I do you for?" He said cheerfully.

Jack paused for a moment, looking over at a photograph of Kate and him with the children last Christmas. Their last Christmas together...had she known that at the time? A scuffle at the open bedroom door caught his attention, and he looked over to see Leah standing in the doorway, a now awake Rachel settled on her hip. She looked at him, having heard most of the conversation, and had heard her real fathers name mentioned.

"Doc, you still there?" Sawyer asked down the phone.

Jack rubbed his forehead as Leah came into the bedroom. Rachel crawled across and sat in Jack's lap, who held an arm around her, and Leah sat down beside him. "Sawyer, I need you to be in LA in three days time." He said simply.

"I'm already in LA, Doc, always have been." Sawyer told him, and for a moment, Jack wanted to scream at him. He had been in LA the entire time, and he hadn't come to visit his daughter once? "Something happened?" Sawyer asked, finally noticing the emptiness in Jack's voice.

"Yes, something's happened. Can you be here, or not?" Jack asked.

"What for?" Sawyer asked. Why did he have to ask so many questions?

"Sawyer, just be here." Jack instructed. "And bring a suit."

"A suit? What, has someone died, or somethin'? Good old Locke finally popped his clogs?"

Jack went silent, and resisted the temptation to yell at Sawyer right over the phone, like he deserved, but he didn't. Instead, he felt the phone being taken out of his hands. Looking to his side, he saw Leah taking the phone from him, swallowing the lump in her throat as she did so. Jack braced himself, this would be the first time in so many years that she would have heard her father's voice, but she spoke with a clear voice.

"Dad?" She asked. Jack didn't feel jealous when she called him 'dad', because to her, 'dad' was a name of desperation. It was rare that she referred to either of them as her father. "It's Leah."

"Leah?" Sawyer asked, his tone softing. "My Leah? Jeez, kid, didn't expect to hear your voice."

"Thought as much." She agreed.

"How are you?" Sawyer asked.

"Dad..." She started, but cut off. Jack put his newly free arm around her shoulders as she tried to cover up how much she was hurting.

"What is it?" Saywer asked, worry clearly showing in his voice. "Leah, kid, what's happening over there?"

"Just be here." She said. "Just...please...be here."

Sawyer took a deep breath. "Leah, sweetheart, I know that you probably hate me for a million reasons, but I know that something's wrong. What's happened over there?"

"Mom's dead." She blurted out, two tears spilling over her cheeks.

"What?"

"She's dead. She died last night." Leah repeated.

Sawyer was silent. "What happened?" He asked eventually.

"She was sick. Really sick." Leah told him.

Again, Sawyer was silent.

"Are you coming?" She asked.

Sawyer sighed, the news of Kate's death still sinking in. "You still live in the same house?" He checked, his voice now resembling Jack's broken one.

"Yeah." Leah said.

"I'll be there when I finish work this afternoon." He confirmed.

"Okay." Leah said, then hung up the phone, passing it back to Jack, who placed the handset back on the set.

"You okay?" He asked her, holding her again.

She nodded, sniffing back some tears and wiping underneath her eyes for the ones that were already there. "He's coming round after work." She told Jack.


	4. Chapter 4

Leah felt the pain creeping up again as she saw the old truck pull up outside. She knew, straight away, that it was him. She recognised the old red pick up, and knew that he can't have even bothered to change his car. Worse still, it was one that she saw around town quite a lot, with a pair of baby's sneakers tied by the laces underneath the rear view mirror.

She got to her feet from where she'd been sitting by the window, leaving behind Ben, who was, again, watching television silently. She didn't got to the door, ready to answer it, however. She turned to the stairs. She headed up, going straight to the bathroom, where Jack was on his knees giving Rachel a bath. Rachel was perfectly fine playing with her bath toys, whilst Jack kneeled and watched her sadly.

"A car just pulled up outside." Leah said matter-of-factly as she leaned against the doorframe, folding her arms over her chest.

Jack looked up from Rachel, noticing Leah's reserved pose, exactly like Kate's, and sighed. "That's probably Sawyer." He told her. "Do you want to get the door?"

"Not really." She shook her head.

"That's okay." Jack said, giving her a soft, reassuring smile. "You mind taking over with Rachel, though? I don't want to leave her alone up here."

She nodded, stepping into the bathroom. "Sure."

Jack watched as she sat on the closed toilet lid, watching her younger sister play with the floating boats that had been Ben's. Leah hadn't liked the boats. She'd had the ducks instead. Rachel liked to reverse them though. She liked to pretend that the ducks were boats, and the boats were ducks.

He turned on his heel, leaving the two girls in the bathroom, and then approached the front door. As he reached the bottom stair, Ben spoke out to him, not moving his sight from the television. "Someone's at the door." He said quietly.

Jack cast a helpless look towards his son, and then turned back to the door, pulling it open towards him.

Sawyer looked so aged. His once dirty blonde hair was lined with silver now, as was his stubble. His eyes were devoid of the usually cheekiness and sarcasm he was used to. "Hey." He said, in a slightly pained voice.

"Hey." Jack nodded, and then stepped back. "Come on in."

Sawyer did wordlessly, not knowing what he could say. At only a first glance at the well kept house, even in a time like this, he knew that his daughter had been given a better upbringing here, from Jack, than she would have gotten from him. This house was everything a family deserved. There was photographs of smiling faces on the wall, wallpaper that was softly decorated, toys stacked away in the corner.

He turned his thoughts, and his eyes, away from the life he could never have provided, and looked at Jack. "You okay?" He asked, seeing the heartbreak that had taken up home on his face.

Jack gave him a tired look. "The woman I love died in my arms this morning. No, I'm not okay." He said, in a low voice.

Sawyer nodded, realising that he should have known better than to ask a question like that. Still, he couldn't help himself. "She okay?"

"I take it by 'she' you mean your daughter?" Jack assumed.

Sawyer sighed heavily, dropping his arms to his sides heavily. "Cut the 'bad father's speech, Doc. Is she okay?"

"Stupid question really." Jack said in a manner very unlike his usual. "She's watched her mother wasting away whilst she was sick, and this morning she's been told that she's never going to get to see her again. She's anything but okay."

"Where is she?" Sawyer asked, looking around and spotting what must have been their son on the couch watching television, but no sign of Leah.

"Upstairs." Jack said, nodding towards the stairs. "Giving Rachel a bath."

"Rachel?" Sawyer asked, doing a double take.

"Mine and Kate's youngest." Jack said simply, his eyes falling on a picture of all three of the children together, taken last year on the beach. It would have been their last vacation together as a family.

"I didn't realise you had another one." Sawyer said, following Jack's gaze to the photograph. "I knew about Ben an'all, but not another one."

"Kate left letters." Jack said, steering the conversation safely away from the children for a moment. "There's one for you as well."

Sawyer followed Jack upstairs to the bedroom. He remained in the doorway, feeling to awkward to go into the room that Kate shared with Jack. As he waited, aware of Jack rooting through for the letters, he caught sight of the bathroom door wide open at the end of the hall.

Bent over the bath was Leah, though he could only see her blonde hair over her shoulders. She couldn't see him, as she had her back turned, but she was entertaining the other little girl before her with toy boats. This was the first time he'd been this close to her in a long time.

Jack came back, noticing that Sawyer's attention was firmly fixed on Leah. "Yeah, that's her."

Sawyer shot him a nasty gaze for a moment. "I know that's her." He said firmly, insulted that Jack thought he wouldn't recognise his own daughter.

"Leave her be for a moment." Jack said, taking no notice of Sawyer's harsh tone, but instead, looking softly upon the girl they both considered to be their daughter.

"I wanna talk to her." Sawyer replied.

"Let her come to you." Jack advised. "She's having the worse day of her life, Sawyer. Let her at least have control over one thing today."

Sawyer sighed. "Let's have this letter then."

In the bathroom, Leah forced herself not to turn around. When she'd heard footsteps on the stairs, she'd turned her back to the open door, and focused on Rachel and her toys. She'd heard every word exchanged by Jack and her father, but had pretended not to.

"Whoozat?" Rachel asked curiously, spotting the man accompanying her father down the hall.

Leah took a breath. She couldn't tell a four year old that it was her father. "That's Dad's friend." She said, even though she knew he was more of her mothers than Jack's. Rachel was four. She didn't understand the complex relationship between the three.

"'Kay." She replied, before going back to her boats.

---------------

Back downstairs, Jack took Sawyer through to the kitchen, both of them sitting down at the table opposite one another.

"She looks so much like Freckles." Sawyer sighed, rubbing his hand over his forehead momentarily. "Even when she was just born she did. I just thought that when she grew up, she'd grow out of it a bit."

Jack nodded in agreement. "The only thing that isn't like Kate is her hair. So many times I thought I've heard Kate's voice today, but it's been Leah."

"How long did she know?" Sawyer asked.

"Leah?"

"Kate. How long did she know she was sick?"

"It's been eighteen months now." Jack revealed, causing Sawyer to swear under his breath. "Three months ago, she went for an appointment at the hospital, and told us that she had approximately a year left."

"And it got too bad, too quickly, huh?" Sawyer mused.

"No." Jack said, shaking his head. "It got bad exactly how they said it would. She lied about the time she had left, so that we wouldn't spend the last few months feeling sadder than we needed to be."

Sawyer shot him a stupid look. "You're a doctor, couldn't you know that?" He accused.

"I wasn't her doctor, Sawyer." Jack pointed out. "We did everything we could to save her, but the cancer was too far gone when they found it in the first place. She...she never stood a chance."

Sawyer looked down at his hands, hands that had once held Kate in them. "It shouldn't have been this way." He said softly. "Not her."

"I know." Jack nodded, he'd been through this a thousand times in his head in the past eighteen months.

"So, we all got letters?" Sawyer asked.

"One each for Ben and Rachel, when they turn twelve years oold. One for lead whenever she's ready to read it. One for me. One for you. One each for the kids on their eighteenth birthdays." Jack told him.

"What's going to happen to Leah?" He asked.

"What do you mean?" Jack asked, confused.

"Is she staying here with you?"

Jack sighed, casting a look into the living room. Ben was sitting on the couch, Rachel now beside him. Leah, he could see, was just heading upstairs again. "I honestly don't know." He shrugged. "With all the adoption process being so slow and confusing for everyone, I'm not sure whether it was finalised before today. If it wasn't..."

"Let's hope it was." Sawyer said quickly, before Jack could finish his sentence.

Jack gave him an exasperated look. "Sawyer, she's your daughter too."

He shook his head. "No, she's your daughter, Doc. You're the one that's always been there."

"She still thinks of you as her father." He told him.

Sawyer shook his head again. "She lost her mom this morning. The past ten years of her life, she's been living with you. You, Freckles, and your kids. You're her family. She's had her mom taken away from her, and then you want me to take her away from the only family she's got left?"

Jack didn't answer, as Ben appeared in the doorway. "What's the matter, Ben?" He asked.

"Mom didn't go shopping yesterday." He said simply. "She said she was going to go today."

"Oh, damnit." Jack said, realising that there was nothing to eat in the house without the shopping. "I completely forgot."

"Me and Rachel are hungry." Ben told him.

"What about Leah?"

"She said she don't want dinner."

"Oh, God." Jack mumbled into his hands. "Um...right. We'll order in. What do you want?"

"Pizza." Ben said. "Lots of pizza."

"Okay, I'll order pizza." Ben disappeared, going back in front of the television. Jack turned back to Sawyer. "You should stay for a while, if you want to talk to Leah."

"That an invitation?"


End file.
